Raising Chickens in the Backyard

For our second anniversary in 2014, me and Amy wanted to do something different and unusual to celebrate.... so we got chickens!!

We have talked about getting chickens and raising them in our backyard since we got married. We hear the stories about how much drugs, hormones, chems are pumped into hens that lay the eggs we buy at the supermarket and we decided that we will no longer support that. (We also heard about the inhumane treatment of chickens in these farms .... and we didn’t care, we just want our eggs to be chems and drug free.) Union City allows you to own up to three chickens, so we decided to get three.

We talked about this for a while..... and then we decided to do it! The first thing to do was to construct a chicken coop. We did a bunch of research, went to home depot to buy some wood and stuff, and in a two weekends, we hammered this out.. .. I’m not a big fan of the color, but I must say it was a job well done..

Okay.. jk.. In reality, this is what it looked like... As we are putting it together.



Completed product looks something like this



Not the most elegant, but it’ll get the job done. The chickens will stay dry and they have plenty of room to roam and play. Only free range for my chickens (where free range is about 3 sqft). It took us about a month to put together, and in the end the total cost was about $70. Mainly for the wood. The roof shingles we got for free from a neighbor who was redoing their roof, the paint and screws I got from my garage.

So the next step was to get the actual chickens. Amy scoured Craigslist for a bit for weeks and we decided to goto a backyard chicken breeder. It seemed that most sellers were either professional breeders (who own a farm or a lot of land) or backyard breeders (people who just raise chickens and sell them out of their yard). We found a lady that sold chickens in Fairfield (1.5 hours away), and got three white Delaware poulets.



We named them Alison, Sarah and Cosima, after the Orphan Black clones.

We introduced them into their new home and then we waited for them to lay eggs... And waited ... and waited... and waited... The Fairfield lady said they would start laying within 2 months, but when three months passed and no eggs...We were getting worried!! What if our chickens were impotent? Or if we bought dud chickens... We fiddled around with their nests to make it more comfortable for egg laying, but still nothing happened. We started thinking maybe it’s time to give up chicken raising and then one day, in the middle of August.



Eggs! Lovely eggs! They were laying them in a hidden spot we didn’t know about! If you look closely, it’s a cactus bush, so I guess they liked the cactus bush better than the nests we made..

So we made some adjustments to the nests, so we went online, made some adjustment to the nests... And bam! In the nest!! They now like the nests and lay their eggs there. Since August we’ve gotten over 100 eggs, and ate a lot of them. I must say, organic fresh chicken eggs taste much better than the store bought ones.

Egg sandwich. Look at the size of that yolk.

Overall, it’s a bit of work to raise chickens, but I enjoy it. It’s fun and rewarding work. I get the joy of knowing I eat hormone free/drug free healthy raised chickens.

Happy Anniversary Alison, Sarah and Cosima!